"By the year 2000, 50 per cent of full-time faculty will be over 55, and 68 percent will be over 50." Those who find this statistic frightening might be calmed by The Vitality of Senior Faculty Members: Snow on the Roof--Fire in the Furnace. Bland and Bergquist conclude that senior faculty can be a very valuable asset in a time of accelerating change in American higher education. Colleges and universities simply need to recognize that senior faculty need a different kind of support than do junior and entry-level faculty.
"The key environmental factors for senior faculty appear to be opportunities for growth, a sense of being appreciated by the leaders of the institution, a sense of collegiality, and a sense of commitment by the leaders of the institution to the college's or university's founding mission." The authors uncover research suggesting that senior faculty are no longer particularly motivated by salary increases. They seek instead other forms of appreciation, like opportunities for continued professional development, flexible teaching schedules, sabbaticals, opportunities for retraining, workshops (that "they can design and carry out at their own pace"), new research projects, independent study grants, the opportunity to mentor, eased responsibilities for committee assignments, research support, options for partial early retirement, opportunities for meaningful team teaching, part-time administrative assignments, and faculty exchange programs. "Given that students' learning and development tend to occur at those points in their lives when there is a balance between challenge and support, perhaps we should offer senior faculty support during times when their careers are being most fully challenged and challenges when their careers are relatively quiet and filled with supportive structures."
Though, "on average, research productivity drops off with age," quality in research remains generally steady among senior faculty and "most senior faculty are confident in their teaching and research skills," possessing "a deep sense of commitment to their institutions," and profiting from "a vital network of professional colleagues." Only a small proportion of senior faculty "feel stuck."
To more vividly illustrate these issues of faculty vitality, the authors correlate their summary of research with Joseph Axelrod's famous case study of one Stephen Abbot--a pseudonymous university professor from a real American college campus who was profiled first in Axelrod's The University Teacher as Artist (1973) when "Abbot" was a young faculty member of the late 1960s then later in Improving Teaching Styles (1980) when "Abbot" was a faculty member in his late 1970s mid-career. Here, Axelrod has extended his portrait and "Abbot" is sketched now as a faculty member with senior status, developing a "postmodernist" approach to teaching, an openness to technological developments in the classroom, and now shifting into an early retirement program where he teaches half time. Sadly, as a senior professor, "the portrait of Stephen Abbot is of a man who is struggling to remain vital in an institution that he perceives no longer appreciates his contributions, lacks a sense of collegiality, and has abandoned a commitment to innovation in general and educational innovation in particular."
The authors reassure that "there appears to be no significant decline in competence or productivity as a function of age. . . .While the productivity of senior faculty does not shift downward, a shift does occur in their priorities and values. Understanding these new priorities will be helpful in preserving the vitality of senior faculty."
Terry Nienhuis, Western Carolina University